25 Steps to becoming a Bundesliga Hipster

The Irish website balls.ie suggested to its readers how they could turn into football hipsters by following 25 simple steps. A little bit later on 11 Freunde elaborated on the idea and published a guide on how Germans could turn into football hipsters. We at the Bundesliga Fanatic, however, think that there is still an entire species of hipster which hasn’t been mentioned by either list: The Bundesliga hipster!

Here are 25 simple steps to follow if you want to become a Bundesliga hipster.

1. Whenever in a discussion about German football, start the sentence with “Well, according to Uli Hesse’s Tor!…”

2. Slip in German words into any football conversation whenever possible. Bayern are the “Herbstmeister” due to their fantastic “Hinrunde” and the rest of the season is simply going to be a “Schaulaufen” for them etc.

3. Talk excessively about Schalke’s use of Roman Neustädter as a tilted holding midfielder, or “gekippter sechser”, referring to the articles you have read on Spielverlagerung. Throw a hissy fit and leave the room in indignation if the person you are talking to hasn’t heard of Spielverlagerung.

4. When reading an article that quotes kicker and it’s written with a capital K, immediately send a letter of complaint to the editor requesting the immediate sacking of the author for “gross inaccuracy”.

5. Keep banging on about how Mike Hanke is the most underrated player in the league, and that Löw’s blindness has denied him the career he should have had in the national team.

6. Keep referring to the national team as “Die Mannschaft”. Get angry at the people around you who don’t do so as well.

7. Assure your girlfriend that you won’t be leaving her any time soon by telling her that your relationship is just as stable as Bayern’s finances.

8. Get a tattoo of Jan Åge Fjørtoft’s face on your back and place another tattoo of his famous quote right beneath it:”I don’t know if Felix Magath could have saved the Titanic, but all of its passengers would have been in great physical shape!”(In German, of course.)

9. Write a letter in which you threaten Four Four Two to write an expose about their magazine on your blog, after they once again have managed to neglect to put the Umlaut (Umlaut=ä, ü and ö) in Andy Möller’s name.

11. Tell your friends that you are learning German by reading some obscure book about the footballing history of Schleswig-Holstein.

12. Memorize the scoring stats of Alexander Frei, Ebi Smolarek and Nelson Haedo Valdez to prove that you’re not a BvB newcomer.

13. Get in a Twitter argument with Raphael Honigstein telling him that your team is called Eintracht Frankfurt, and not just simply Eintracht.

14. Play FIFA 13 using Klopp’s pressing tactics, or as you like to call it: “Gegenpressing”!

15. Keep checking the website of Badische Zeitung every day to see if they have published another video snippet from one of Christan Streich’s legendary press conferences.

16. Start collecting zany German football shirts. Punch your mate in the face if he doesn’t recognize the shirt you are wearing as the Rot-Weiss Essen kit from the 1972/73 season.

17. Make your girlfriend aware of the fact that you are sexually aroused by telling her that you are just as hard as one of Felix Magath’s training sessions.

18. When going to weddings, you ignore the dances such as the lawnmower, the mashed potato and other similar ones: you do the Peter Neururer.

19. Whenever you are visiting Germany refuse to watch Sky’s coverage of the Bundesliga. Instead you are spending most of your weekend in a crummy hotel room trying to find a stream with Eurosport 2’s commentary, because Stuart Telford’s commentary is La Traviata compared to Marcel Reif’s annoying version of Cats.

20. When asked to wear something Christmassy for your Christmas family reunion, you turn up in your Werder Bremen Weihnachtstrikot.

21. Tell your friends and family that your most treasured possession is a VHS tape of St. Pauli’s derby win over Hamburger SV in 1977. You are, after all, longing for the good old days when The Buccaneers still were a club that hadn’t sold out.

22. Spend your summer holidays inside, writing a 250 page long essay on the supremacy of the Bundesliga during the 70s. Compare Günter Netzer’s swagger and guile as often as possible to James Dean’s sex appeal. All German football blogs and publications have been rendered unnecessary after you have published your essay as an eBook.

23. Do not under any circumstances miss Talking Fussball. You are worshipping James Thorogood! If anyone asks why, get misty eyed, stare into the distance and tell people all about the first time you heard James on the German Soccer Podcast on The Munich Times.

24. Happily and impulsively take a vacation day to watch a crappy stream of a Tuesday Babelsberg-Hansa Rostock match. After all, the next Tom Trybull might be on the pitch.

Related Articles

In the spirit of The Classical’s fabulous Why We Watch series, I wanted to write something similar about Borussia Dortmund. While The Classical’s series covers individual athletes (mostly basketball players), I’m going to extend this concept to cover a […]

Watching the Bundesliga relegation playoffs the other day between Hoffenheim and Kaiserslautern, one could not but realise the huge difference between both clubs. And I’m not talking about the difference in quality, but rather the […]